Know-How Exchange : Customer Behavior

Hi

I’m always astonished how management consultants can’t consult on their own management processes! The decision is down to you and the way your company works or wants to work – not on how other people might or might not do it. I also seem to disagree with Michael, which is unusual. I think that the sales cycle in management consultancy defines itself from the discussions which arise from the initial contact, so you can’t understand it until it unfolds.

Your question was single fold – to what (Or was that to whom?) is the ultimate sale credited. Well, it depends on how you decide to split the rewards within your company. Tracking the lead can certainly allow you to make an intellectually valid decision, but at the end of the day the decision of allocation is inevitably subjective and quite driven by ego and politics.

Can I assume that you log the lead on some sort of CRM system or database? Otherwise you will be chasing endless bits of paper, word files and volatile spreadsheets. So as a starting point, you know who or what campaign was responsible for generating the lead. It is not beyond the wit of management to allocate some share of the profit to the person or the department which was responsible for generating the enquiry.

Equally, though the volume of enquiries and sales in Management Consulting is rarely large enough to permit a meaningful statistical analysis of enquiry to sales-profit ratios, you could still award some more immediate bonus for lead generation on the basis that someone has to work well to produce the leads and that whatever brand of idiot or superhero is employed further down the sales chain, on average x% get converted into sales with an average value of £whatever. Don’t tell me that you can’t do this – you do 5 year plans based on conversion ratios for other people, don’t you?!

The lead does not acquire an individual value until someone has had a sales orientated conversation with the prospect. Only then can you form a view to the potential value of the business, the time scale of the enquiry and the probability of getting anywhere with it.

That means allocating the lead to someone to ask these questions. The questions should be structured, meaningful and consistent from lead to lead. Hopefully, through a mixture of professionalism and salesmanship they will quantify everything and move the process forward. That lot can be logged to the forecasting or opportunity part of the CRM system. By now the lead will have acquired a number of characteristics:
1. An owner
2. A tentative value
3. A potential date for transacting business
4. A percentage likelihood of the thing coming to fruition
5. A next sales step and a date for the next sales step
6. Some other things which will pertain to your company and yours alone.


As time progresses, the original questions and point 5 above will dictate what you do next. By all means, keep in contact with the prospect via a newsletter, but at all stages, dialogue, if it is sales based, will seek permission to re-contact the prospect in order to clarify, progress or terminate the process.

Your sales forecast, pipeline, opportunity funnel or whatever you call it can be adjusted as new intelligence comes in. If your CRM system is intelligently configured, you will be able to observe how the opportunity is metamorphosing over time.

Is the value changing?
Is the close date moving forwards or backwards?
Is the possibility of doing business going up or down? (If a prospect loses a budget or gets the sack, it will significantly affect the value of the lead!)

These snapshots of an opportunity tell the owner of the lead and your management a lot about how the enquiry is being handled.

Should ownership pass to someone else? Sometimes it is necessary. If a relationship breaks down, someone else needs to take over. If someone is mucking around, then they need to be relieved of that duty. Some managements like to cycle their leads around the team if they have not matured into an order within a certain time frame, rather like a bank that hawks a bad debt around debt collection agencies until it finds one which is nasty enough to get a result. I think that you can discern my view on that approach.

If you are always asking the right questions, always noting the answers and always asking “What Next” and logging it, you can track the process and the performance of the people handling the process.

You can then reward the sales people according to the hard measurements you have taken. If the company has enough cash they can even reward people (Such as the marketing team who kicked of this whole shebang) at key stages which can be pre-defined or simply arbitrary time-scales, depending on performance. Reward on payment for the completion of a project is most common. It is usually mainly to the owner or the lead or the team which has worked on it up to and including the placing of the order. Sometimes, the implementation team are included. Sometimes the profit is paid as a share to all employees who were involved on a pro-rata basis. Some organisations I have come across should put it into their Christmas Pudding so that someone can go,”Oh! I’ve got the silver sixpence”

How you dish out the rewards, will depend entirely on what management philosophy and what reward philosophy your company adopts, which is where I come back to the beginning of this rather long answer.

As management consultants, you are best placed to ask yourselves the necessary questions to decide that particular riddle.

Alternatively, for a fee, I’ll do it for you!

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions